Constance went up to her own rooms; she could hear her mother speaking, in a room on the same floor, to one of the maids; but for her present anxiety, her mother offered no help and could not even be consulted. Nor could any message she might send to her father explain the situation to him. She was throbbing with determination and action, as she found her purse and counted the money in it. She never in her life had gone alone upon an extended journey, much less been alone upon a train over night. If she spoke of such a thing now, she would be prevented; no occasion for it would be recognized; she would not be allowed to go, even if "properly accompanied." She could not, therefore, risk taking a handbag from the house; so she thrust nightdress and toilet articles into her muff and the roomy pocket of her fur coat. She descended to the side door of the house and, unobserved, let herself out noiselessly on to the carriage drive. She gained the street and turned westward at the first corner to a street car which would take her to the railway station.
There was a train to the north every evening; it was not, she knew, such a train as ran in the resort season, and she was not certain of the exact time of its departure; but she would be in time for it. The manner of buying a railway ticket and of engaging a berth were unknown to her—there had been servants always to do these things—but she watched others and did as they did. On the train, the berths had been made up; people were going to bed behind some of the curtains. She procured a telegraph blank and wrote a message to her mother, telling her that she had gone north to join her father. When the train had started, she gave the message to the porter, directing him to send it from the first large town at which they stopped.
She left the light burning in its little niche at the head of the berth; she had no expectation that she could sleep; shut in by the green curtains, she drew the covers up about her and stared upward at the paneled face of the berth overhead. Then new frightened distrust of the man she had been about to marry flowed in upon her and became all her thought.
She had not promised Uncle Benny that she would not marry Henry; her promise had been that she would not engage herself to that marriage until she had seen Uncle Benny again. Uncle Benny's own act—his disappearance—-had prevented her from seeing him; for that reason she had broken her promise; and, from its breaking, something terrifying, threatening to herself had come. She had been amazed at what she had seen in Henry; but she was appreciating now that, strangely, in her thought of him there was no sense of loss to herself. Her feeling of loss, of something gone from her which could not be replaced, was for Alan. She had had admiration for Henry, pride in him; had she mistaken what was merely admiration for love? She had been about to marry him; had it been only his difference from the other men she knew that had made her do that? Unconsciously to herself, had she been growing to love Alan?
Constance could not, as yet, place Henry's part in the strange circumstances which had begun to reveal themselves with Alan's coming to Chicago; but Henry's hope that Uncle Benny and Alan were dead was beginning to make that clearer. She lay without voluntary movement in her berth, but her bosom was shaking with the thoughts which came to her.
Twenty years before, some dreadful event had altered Uncle Benny's life; his wife had known—or had learned—enough of that event so that she had left him. It had seemed to Constance and her father, therefore, that it must have been some intimate and private event. They had been confirmed in believing this, when Uncle Benny, in madness or in fear, had gone away, leaving everything he possessed to Alan Conrad. But Alan's probable relationship to Uncle Benny had not been explanation; she saw now that it had even been misleading. For a purely private event in Uncle Benny's life—even terrible scandal—could not make Henry fear, could not bring terror of consequences to himself. That could be only if Henry was involved in some peculiar and intimate way with what had happened to Uncle Benny. If he feared Uncle Benny's being found alive and feared Alan's being found alive too, now that Alan had discovered Uncle Benny, it was because he dreaded explanation of his own connection with what had taken place.
Constance raised her window shade slightly and looked out. It was still snowing; the train was running swiftly among low sand hills, snow-covered, and only dimly visible through snow and dark. A deep-toned, steady roar came to her above the noises of the train. The lake! Out there, Alan and Uncle Benny were fighting, still struggling perhaps, against bitter cold and ice and rushing water for their lives. She must not think of that!
Uncle Benny had withdrawn himself from men; he had ceased to be active in his business and delegated it to others. This change had been strangely advantageous to Henry. Henry had been hardly more than a common seaman then. He had been a mate—the mate on one of Uncle Benny's ships. Quite suddenly he had become Uncle Benny's partner. Henry had explained this to her by saying that Uncle Benny had felt madness coming on him and had selected him as the one to take charge. But Uncle Benny had not trusted Henry; he had been suspicious of him; he had quarreled with him. How strange, then, that Uncle Benny should have advanced and given way to a man whom he could not trust!
It was strange, too, that if—as Henry had said—their quarrels had been about the business, Uncle Benny had allowed Henry to remain in control.
Their quarrels had culminated on the day that Uncle Benny went away. Afterward Uncle Benny had come to her and warned her not to marry Henry; then he had sent for Alan. There had been purpose in these acts of Uncle Benny's; had they meant that Uncle Benny had been on the verge of making explanation—that explanation which Henry feared—and that he had been—prevented? Her father had thought this; at least, he had thought that Uncle Benny must have left some explanation in his house. He had told Alan that, and had given Alan the key to the house so that he could find it. Alan had gone to the house—
In the house Alan had found some one who had mistaken him for a ghost, a man who had cried out at sight of him something about a ship—about theMiwaka, the ship of whose loss no one had known anything except by the sounding of the Drum. What had the man been doing in the house? Had he too been looking for the explanation—the explanation that Henry feared? Alan had described the man to her; that description had not had meaning for her before; but now remembering that description she could think of Henry as the only one who could have been in that house! Henry had fought with Alan there! Afterwards, when Alan had been attacked upon the street, had Henry anything to do with that?
Henry had lied to her about being in Duluth the night he had fought with Alan; he had not told her the true cause of his quarrels with Uncle Benny; he had wished her to believe that Uncle Benny was dead when the wedding ring and watch came to her—the watch which had been Captain Stafford's of theMiwaka! Henry had urged her to marry him at once. Was that because he wished the security that her father—and she—must give her husband when they learned the revelation which Alan or Uncle Benny might bring?
If so, then that revelation had to do with theMiwaka. It was of theMiwakathat Henry had cried out to Alan in the house; they were the names of the next of kin of those on theMiwakathat Uncle Benny had kept. That was beginning to explain to her something of the effect on Henry of the report that the Drum was telling that some on Ferry Number 25 were alive, and why he had hurried north because of that. The Drum—so superstition had said—had beat the roll of those who died with theMiwaka; had beaten for all but one! No one of those who accepted the superstition had ever been able to explain that; but Henry could! He knew something more about theMiwakathan others knew. He had encountered theMiwakasomehow or encountered some one saved from theMiwaka; he knew, then, that the Drum had beaten correctly for theMiwaka, that one was spared as the Drum had told! Who had that one been? Alan? And was he now among those for whom the Drum had not yet beat?
She recalled that, on the day when theMiwakawas lost, Henry and Uncle Benny had been upon the lake in a tug. Afterwards Uncle Benny had grown rich; Henry had attained advancement and wealth. Her reasoning had brought her to the verge of a terrible discovery. If she could take one more step forward in her thought, it would make her understand it all. But she could not yet take that step.
In the morning, at Traverse City—where she got a cup of coffee and some toast in the station eating house—she had to change to a day coach. It had grown still more bitterly cold; the wind which swept the long brick-paved platform of the station was arctic; and even through the double windows of the day coach she could feel its chill. The points of Grand Traverse Bay were frozen across; frozen across too was Torch Lake; to north of that, ice, snow-covered, through which frozen rushes protruded, marked the long chain of little lakes known as the "Intermediates." The little towns and villages, and the rolling fields with their leafless trees or blackened stumps, lay under drifts. It had stopped snowing, however, and she found relief in that; searchers upon the lake could see small boats now—if there were still small boats to be seen.
To the people in her Pullman, the destruction of the ferry had been only a news item competing for interest with other news on the front pages of their newspapers; but to these people in the day coach, it was an intimate and absorbing thing. They spoke by name of the crew as of persons whom they knew. A white lifeboat, one man told her, had been seen south of Beaver Island; another said there had been two boats. They had been far off from shore, but, according to the report cabled from Beaver, there had appeared to be men in them; the men—her informant's voice hushed slightly—had not been rowing. Constance shuddered. She had heard of things like that on the quick-freezing fresh water of the lakes—small boats adrift crowded with men sitting upright in them, ice-coated, frozen, lifeless!
Petoskey, with its great hotels closed and boarded up, and its curio shops closed and locked, was blocked with snow. She went from the train directly to the telegraph office. If Henry was in Petoskey, they would know at that office where he could be found; he would be keeping in touch with them. The operator in charge of the office knew her, and his manner became still more deferential when she asked after Henry.
Mr. Spearman, the man said, had been at the office early in the day; there had been no messages for him; he had left instructions that any which came were to be forwarded to him through the men who, under his direction, were patroling the shore for twenty miles north of Little Traverse, watching for boats. The operator added to the report she had heard upon the train. One lifeboat and perhaps two had been seen by a farmer who had been on the ice to the south of Beaver; the second boat had been far to the south and west of the first one; tugs were cruising there now; it had been many hours, however, after the farmer had seen the boats before he had been able to get word to the town at the north end of the island—St. James—so that the news could be cabled to the mainland. Fishermen and seamen, therefore, regarded it as more likely, from the direction and violence of the gale, that the boats, if they continued to float, would be drifted upon the mainland than that they would be found by the tugs.
Constance asked after her father. Mr. Sherrill and Mr. Spearman, the operator told her, had been in communication that morning; Mr. Sherrill had not come to Petoskey; he had taken charge of the watch along the shore at its north end. It was possible that the boats might drift in there; but men of experience considered it more probable that the boats would drift in farther south where Mr. Spearman was in charge.
Constance crossed the frozen edges of the bay by sledge to Harbor Point. The driver mentioned Henry with admiration and with pride in his acquaintance with him; it brought vividly to her the recollection that Henry's rise in life was a matter of personal congratulation to these people as lending luster to the neighborhood and to themselves. Henry's influence here was far greater than her own or her father's; if she were to move against Henry or show him distrust, she must work alone; she could enlist no aid from these.
And her distrust now had deepened to terrible dread. She had not been able before this to form any definite idea of how Henry could threaten Alan and Uncle Benny; she had imagined only vague interference and obstruction of the search for them; she had not foreseen that he could so readily assume charge of the search and direct, or misdirect, it.
At the Point she discharged the sledge and went on foot to the house of the caretaker who had charge of the Sherrill cottage during the winter. Getting the keys from him, she let herself into the house. The electric light had been cut off, and the house was darkened by shutters, but she found a lamp and lit it. Going to her room, she unpacked a heavy sweater and woolen cap and short fur coat—winter things which were left there against use when they opened the house sometimes out of season—and put them on. Then she went down and found her snowshoes. Stopping at the telephone, she called long distance and asked them to locate Mr. Sherrill, if possible, and instruct him to move south along the shore with whomever he had with him. She went out then, and fastened on her snowshoes.
It had grown late. The early December dusk—the second dusk since little boats had put off from Number 25—darkened the snow-locked land. The wind from the west cut like a knife, even through her fur coat. The pine trees moaned and bent, with loud whistlings of the wind among their needles; the leafless elms and maples crashed their limbs together; above the clamor of all other sounds, the roaring of the lake came to her, the booming of the waves against the ice, the shatter of floe on floe. No snow had fallen for a few hours, and the sky was even clearing; ragged clouds scurried before the wind and, opening, showed the moon.
Constance hurried westward and then north, following the bend of the shore. The figure of a man—one of the shore patrols—pacing the ice hummocks of the beach and staring out upon the lake, appeared vaguely in the dusk when she had gone about two miles. He seemed surprised at seeing a girl, but less surprised when he had recognized her. Mr. Spearman, he told her, was to the north of them upon the beach somewhere, he did not know how far; he could not leave his post to accompany her, but he assured her that there were men stationed all along the shore. She came, indeed, three quarters of a mile farther on, to a second man; about an equal distance beyond, she found a third, but passed him and went on.
Her legs ached now with the unaccustomed travel upon snowshoes; the cold, which had been only a piercing chill at first, was stopping feeling, almost stopping thought. When clouds covered the moon, complete darkness came; she could go forward only slowly then or must stop and wait; but the intervals of moonlight were growing longer and increasing in frequency. As the sky cleared, she went forward quickly for many minutes at a time, straining her gaze westward over the tumbling water and the floes. It came to her with terrifying apprehension that she must have advanced at least three miles since she had seen the last patrol; she could not have passed any one in the moonlight without seeing him, and in the dark intervals she had advanced so little that she could not have missed one that way either.
She tried to go faster as she realized this; but now travel had become more difficult. There was no longer any beach. High, precipitous bluffs, which she recognized as marking Seven Mile Point, descended here directly to the hummocked ice along the water's edge. She fell many times, traveling upon these hummocks; there were strange, treacherous places between the hummocks where, except for her snowshoes, she would have broken through. Her skirt was torn; she lost one of her gloves and could not stop to look for it; she fell again and sharp ice cut her ungloved hand and blood froze upon her finger tips. She did not heed any of these things.
She was horrified to find that she was growing weak, and that her senses were becoming confused. She mistook at times floating ice, metallic under the moonlight, for boats; her heart beat fast then while she scrambled part way up the bluff to gain better sight and so ascertained her mistake. Deep ravines at places broke the shores; following the bend of the bluffs, she got into these ravines and only learned her error when she found that she was departing from the shore. She had come, in all, perhaps eight miles; and she was "playing out"; other girls, she assured herself—other girls would not have weakened like this; they would have had strength to make certain no boats were there, or at least to get help. She had seen no houses; those, she knew, stood back from the shore, high upon the bluffs, and were not easy to find; but she scaled the bluff now and looked about for lights. The country was wild and wooded, and the moonlight showed only the white stretches of the shrouding snow.
She descended to the beach again and went on; her gaze continued to search the lake, but now, wherever there was a break in the bluffs, she looked toward the shore as well. At the third of these breaks, the yellow glow of a window appeared, marking a house in a hollow between snow-shrouded hills. She turned eagerly that way; she could go only very slowly now. There was no path; at least, if there was, the snow drifts hid it. Through the drifts a thicket projected; the pines on the ravine sides overhead stood so close that only a silver tracery of the moonlight came through; beyond the pines, birch trees, stripped of their bark, stood black up to the white boughs.
Constance climbed over leafless briars and through brush and came upon a clearing perhaps fifty yards across, roughly crescent shaped, as it followed the configuration of the hills. Dead cornstalks, above the snow, showed ploughed ground; beyond that, a little, black cabin huddled in the further point of the crescent, and Constance gasped with disappointment as she saw it. She had expected a farmhouse; but this plainly was not even that. The framework was of logs or poles which had been partly boarded over; and above the boards and where they were lacking, black building paper had been nailed, secured by big tin discs. The rude, weather-beaten door was closed; smoke, however, came from a pipe stuck through the roof.
She struggled to the door and knocked upon it, and receiving no reply, she beat upon it with both fists.
"Who's here?" she cried. "Who's here?"
The door opened then a very little, and the frightened face of an Indian woman appeared in the crack. The woman evidently had expected—and feared—some arrival, and was reassured when she saw only a girl. She threw the door wider open, and bent to help unfasten Constance's snowshoes; having done that, she led her in and closed the door.
Constance looked swiftly around the single room of the cabin. There was a cot on one side; there was a table, home carpentered; there were a couple of boxes for clothing or utensils. The stove, a good range once in the house of a prosperous farmer, had been bricked up by its present owners so as to hold fire. Dried onions and yellow ears of corn hung from the rafters; on the shelves were little birchbark canoes, woven baskets, and porcupine quill boxes of the ordinary sort made for the summer trade. Constance recognized the woman now as one who had come sometimes to the Point to sell such things, and who could speak fairly good English. The woman clearly had recognized Constance at once.
"Where is your man?" Constance had caught the woman's arm.
"They sent for him to the beach. A ship has sunk."
"Are there houses near here? You must run to one of them at once. Bring whoever you can get; or if you won't do that, tell me where to go."
The woman stared at her stolidly and moved away. "None near," she said. "Besides, you could not get somebody before some one will come."
"Who is that?"
"He is on the beach—Henry Spearman. He comes here to warm himself. It is nearly time he comes again."
"How long has he been about here?"
"Since before noon. Sit down. I will make you tea."
Constance gazed at her; the woman was plainly glad of her coming. Her relief—relief from that fear she had been feeling when she opened the door—was very evident. It was Henry, then, who had frightened her.
The Indian woman set a chair for her beside the stove, and put water in a pan to heat; she shook tea leaves from a box into a bowl and brought a cup.
"How many on that ship?"
"Altogether there were thirty-nine," Constance replied.
"Some saved?"
"Yes; a boat was picked up yesterday morning with twelve."
The woman seemed making some computation which was difficult for her.
"Seven are living then," she said.
"Seven? What have you heard? What makes you think so?"
"That is what the Drum says."
The Drum! There was a Drum then! At least there was some sound which people heard and which they called the Drum. For the woman had heard it.
The woman shifted, checking something upon her fingers, while her lips moved; she was not counting, Constance thought; she was more likely aiding herself in translating something from Indian numeration into English. "Two, it began with," she announced. "Right away it went to nine. Sixteen then—that was this morning very early. Now, all day and to-night, it has been giving twenty. That leaves seven. It is not known who they may be."
She opened the door and looked out. The roar of the water and the wind, which had come loudly, increased, and with it the wood noises. The woman was not looking about now, Constance realized; she was listening. Constance arose and went to the door too. The Drum! Blood prickled in her face and forehead; it prickled in her finger tips. The Drum was heard only, it was said, in time of severest storm; for that reason it was heard most often in winter. It was very seldom heard by any one in summer; and she was of the summer people. Sounds were coming from the woods now. Were these reverberations the roll of the Drum which beat for the dead? Her voice was uncontrolled as she asked the woman:
"Is that the Drum?"
The woman shook her head. "That's the trees."
Constance's shoulders shook convulsively together. When she had thought about the Drum—and when she had spoken of it with others who, themselves, never had heard it—they always had said that, if there were such a sound, it was trees. She herself had heard those strange wood noises, terrifying sometimes until their source was known—wailings like the cry of some one in anguish, which were caused by two crossed saplings rubbing together; thunderings, which were only some smaller trees beating against a great hollow trunk when a strong wind veered from a certain direction. But this Indian woman must know all such sounds well; and to her the Drum was something distinct from them. The woman specified that now.
"You'll know the Drum when you hear it."
Constance grew suddenly cold. For twenty lives, the woman said, the Drum had beat; that meant to her, and to Constance too now, that seven were left. Indefinite, desperate denial that all from the ferry must be dead—that denial which had been strengthened by the news that at least one boat had been adrift near Beaver—altered in Constance to conviction of a boat with seven men from the ferry, seven dying, perhaps, but not yet dead. Seven out of twenty-seven! The score were gone; the Drum had beat for them in little groups as they had died. When the Drum beat again, would it beat beyond the score?
The woman drew back and closed the door; the water was hot now, and she made the tea and poured a cup for Constance. As she drank it, Constance was listening for the Drum; the woman too was listening. Having finished the tea, Constance returned to the door and reopened it; the sounds outside were the same. A solitary figure appeared moving along the edge of the ice—the figure of a tall man, walking on snowshoes; moonlight distorted the figure, and it was muffled too in a great coat which made it unrecognizable. He halted and stood looking out at the lake and then, with a sudden movement, strode on; he halted again, and now Constance got the knowledge that he was not looking; he was listening as she was. He was not merely listening; his body swayed and bent to a rhythm—he was counting something that he heard. Constance strained her ears; but she could hear no sound except those of the waters and the wind.
"Is the Drum sounding now?" she asked the woman.
"No."
Constance gazed again at the man and found his motion quite unmistakable; he was counting—if not counting something that he heard, or thought he heard, he was recounting and reviewing within himself something that he had heard before—some irregular rhythm which had become so much a part of him that it sounded now continually within his own brain; so that, instinctively, he moved in cadence to it. He stepped forward again now, and turned toward the house.
Her breath caught as she spoke to the woman. "Mr. Spearman is coming here now!"
Her impulse was to remain where she was, lest he should think she was afraid of him; but realization came to her that there might be advantage in seeing him before he knew that she was there, so she reclosed the door and drew back into the cabin.
Noises of the wind and the roaring of the lake made inaudible any sound of his approach to the cabin; she heard his snowshoes, however, scrape the cabin wall as, after taking them off, he leaned them beside the door. He thrust the door open then and came in; he did not see her at first and, as he turned to force the door shut again against the wind, she watched him quietly. She understood at once why the Indian woman had been afraid of him. His face was bloodless, yellow, and swollen-looking, his eyes bloodshot, his lips strained to a thin, straight line.
He saw her now and started and, as though sight of her confused him, he looked away from the woman and then back to Constance before he seemed certain of her.
"Hello!" he said tentatively. "Hello!"
"I'm here, Henry."
"Oh; you are! You are!" He stood drawn up, swaying a little as he stared at her; whiskey was upon his breath, and it became evident in the heat of the room; but whiskey could not account for this condition she witnessed in him. Neither could it conceal that condition; some turmoil and strain within him made him immune to its effects.
She had realized on her way up here what, vaguely, that strain within him must be. Guilt—guilt of some awful sort connected him, and had connected Uncle Benny, with theMiwaka—the lost ship for which the Drum had beaten the roll of the dead. Now dread of revelation of that guilt had brought him here near to the Drum; he had been alone upon the beach twelve hours, the woman had said—listening, counting the beating of the Drum for another ship, fearing the survival of some one from that ship. Guilt was in his thought now—racking, tearing at him. But there was something more than that; what she had seen in him when he first caught sight of her was fear—fear of her, of Constance Sherrill.
He was fully aware, she now understood, that he had in a measure betrayed himself to her in Chicago; and he had hoped to cover up and to dissemble that betrayal with her. For that reason she was the last person in the world whom he wished to find here now.
"The point is," he said heavily, "why are you here?"
"I decided to come up last night."
"Obviously." He uttered the word slowly and with care. "Unless you came in a flying machine. Who came with you?"
"No one; I came alone. I expected to find father at Petoskey; he hadn't been there, so I came on here."
"After him?"
"No; after you, Henry."
"After me?" She had increased the apprehension in him, and he considered and scrutinized her before he ventured to go on. "Because you wanted to be up here with me, eh, Connie?"
"Of course not!"
"What's that?"
"Of course not!"
"I knew it!" he moved menacingly. She watched him quite without fear; fear was for him, she felt, not her. Often she had wished that she might have known him when he was a young man; now, she was aware that, in a way, she was having that wish. Under the surface of the man whose strength and determination she had admired, all the time had been this terror—this guilt. If Uncle Benny had carried it for a score of years, Henry had had it within him too. This had been within him all the time!
"You came up here about Ben Corvet?" he challenged.
"Yes—no!"
"Which do you mean?"
"No."
"I know then. For him, then—eh. For him!"
"For Alan Conrad? Yes," she said.
"I knew it!" he repeated. "He's been the trouble between you and me all the time!"
She made no denial of that; she had begun to know during the last two days that it was so.
"So you came to find him?" Henry went on.
"Yes, Henry. Have you any news?"
"News?"
"News of the boats?"
"News!" he iterated. "News to-night! No one'll have more'n one news to-night!"
From his slow, heavy utterance, a timbre of terrible satisfaction betrayed itself; his eyes widened a little as he saw it strike Constance, then his lids narrowed again. He had not meant to say it that way; yet, for an instant, satisfaction to him had become inseparable from the saying, before that was followed by fright—the fright of examination of just what he had said or of what she had made of it.
"He'll be found!" she defied him.
"Be found?"
"Some are dead," she admitted, "but not all. Twenty are dead; but seven are not!"
She looked for confirmation to the Indian woman, who nodded: "Yes." He moved his head to face the woman, but his eyes, unmoving, remained fixed on Constance.
"Seven?" he echoed. "You say seven are not! How do you know?"
"The Drum has been beating for twenty, but not for more!" Constance said. Thirty hours before, when she had told Henry of the Drum, she had done it without belief herself, without looking for belief in him. But now, whether or not she yet believed or simply clung to the superstition for its shred of hope, it gave her a weapon to terrify him; for he believed—believed with all the unreasoning horror of his superstition and the terror of long-borne and hidden guilt.
"The Drum, Henry!" she repeated. "The Drum you've been listening to all day upon the beach—the Indian Drum that sounded for the dead of theMiwaka; sounded, one by one, for all who died! But it didn't sound for him! It's been sounding again, you know; but, again, it doesn't sound for him, Henry, not for him!"
"TheMiwaka! What do you mean by that? What's that got to do with this?" His swollen face was thrust forward at her; there was threat against her in his tense muscles and his bloodshot eyes.
She did not shrink back from him, or move; and now he was not waiting for her answer. Something—a sound—had caught him about. Once it echoed, low in its reverberation but penetrating and quite distinct. It came, so far as direction could be assigned to it, from the trees toward the shore; but it was like no forest sound. Distinct too was it from any noise of the lake. It was like a Drum! Yet, when the echo had gone, it was a sensation easy to deny—a hallucination, that was all. But now, low and distinct it came again; and, as before, Constance saw it catch Henry and hold him. His lips moved, but he did not speak; he was counting. "Two," she saw his lips form.
The Indian woman passed them and opened the door, and now the sound, louder and more distinct, came again.
"The Drum!" she whispered, without looking about. "You hear? Three, I've heard. Now four! It will beat twenty; then we will know if more are dead!"
The door blew from the woman's hand, and snow, swept up from the drifts of the slope, swirled into the room; the draft blew the flame of the lamp in a smoky streak up the glass chimney and snuffed it out. The moonlight painted a rectangle on the floor; the moonlight gave a green, shimmering world without. Hurried spots of cloud shuttered away the moon for moments, casting shadows which swept raggedly up the slope from the shore. The woman seized the door and, tugging it about against the gale, she slammed it shut. She did not try at once to relight the lamp.
The sound of the Drum was continuing, the beats a few seconds apart. The opening of the door outside had seemed to Constance to make the beats come louder and more distinct; but the closing of the door did not muffle them again. "Twelve," Constance counted to herself. The beats had seemed to be quite measured and regular at first; but now Constance knew that this was only roughly true; they beat rather in rhythm than at regular intervals. Two came close together and there was a longer wait before the next; then three sounded before the measure—a wild, leaping rhythm. She recalled having heard that the strangeness of Indian music to civilized ears was its time; the drums beat and rattles sounded in a different time from the song which they accompanied; there were even, in some dances, three different times contending for supremacy. Now this seemed reproduced in the strange, irregular sounding of the Drum; she could not count with certainty those beats. "Twenty—twenty-one—twenty-two!" Constance caught breath and waited for the next beat; the time of the interval between the measures of the rhythm passed, and still only the whistle of the wind and the undertone of water sounded. The Drum had beaten its roll and, for the moment, was done.
"Now it begins again," the woman whispered. "Always it waits and then it begins over."
Constance let go her breath; the next beat then would not mean another death. Twenty-two, had been her count, as nearly as she could count at all; the reckoning agreed with what the woman had heard. Two had died, then, since the Drum last had beat, when its roll was twenty. Two more than before; that meant five were left! Yet Constance, while she was appreciating this, strained forward, staring at Henry; she could not be certain, in the flickering shadows of the cabin, of what she was seeing in him; still less, in the sudden stoppage of heart and breathing that it brought, could she find coherent answer to its meaning. But still it turned her weak, then spurred her with a vague and terrible impulse.
The Indian woman lifted the lamp chimney waveringly and scratched a match and, with unsteady hands, lighted the wick; Constance caught up her woolen hood from the table and put it on. Her action seemed to call Henry to himself.
"What are you going to do?" he demanded.
"I'm going out."
He moved between her and the door. "Not alone, you're not!" His heavy voice had a deep tone of menace in it; he seemed to consider and decide something about her. "There's a farmhouse about a mile back; I'm going to take you over there and leave you with those people."
"I will not go there!"
He swore. "I'll carry you then!"
She shrank back from him as he lurched toward her with hands outstretched to seize her; he followed her, and she avoided him again; if his guilt and terror had given her mental ascendency over him, his physical strength could still force her to his will and, realizing the impossibility of evading him or overcoming him, she stopped.
"Not that!" she cried. "Don't touch me!"
"Come with me then!" he commanded; and he went to the door and laid his snowshoes on the snow and stepped into them, stooping and tightening the straps; he stood by while she put on hers. He did not attempt again to put hands upon her as they moved away from the little cabin toward the woods back of the clearing; but went ahead, breaking the trail for her with his snowshoes. He moved forward slowly; he could travel, if he had wished, three feet to every two that she could cover, but he seemed not wishing for speed but rather for delay. They reached the trees; the hemlock and pine, black and swaying, shifted their shadows on the moonlit snow; bare maples and beeches, bent by the gale, creaked and cracked; now the hemlock was heavier. The wind, which wailed among the branches of the maples, hissed loudly in the needles of the hemlocks; snow swept from the slopes and whirled and drove about them, and she sucked it in with her breath. All through the wood were noises; a moaning came from a dark copse of pine and hemlock to their right, rose and died away; a wail followed—a whining, whimpering wail—so like the crying of a child that it startled her. Shadows seemed to detach themselves, as the trees swayed, to tumble from the boughs and scurry over the snow; they hid, as one looked at them, then darted on and hid behind the tree trunks.
Henry was barely moving; now he slowed still more. A deep, dull resonance was booming above the wood; it boomed again and ran into a rhythm. No longer was it above; at least it was not only above; it was all about them—here, there, to right and to left, before, behind—the booming of the Drum. Doom was the substance of that sound of the Drum beating the roll of the dead. Could there be abiding in the wood a consciousness which counted that roll? Constance fought the mad feeling that it brought. The sound must have some natural cause, she repeated to herself—waves washing in some strange conformation of the ice caves on the shore, wind reverberating within some great hollow tree trunk as within the pipe of an organ. But Henry was not denying the Drum!
He had stopped in front of her, half turned her way; his body swayed and bent to the booming of the Drum, as his swollen lips counted its soundings. She could see him plainly in the moonlight, yet she drew nearer to him as she followed his count. "Twenty-one," he counted—"Twenty-two!" The Drum was still going on. "Twenty-four—twenty-five—twenty-six!" Would he count another?
He did not; and her pulses, which had halted, leaped with relief; and through her comprehension rushed. It was thus she had seen him counting in the cabin, but so vaguely that she had not been certain of it, but only able to suspect. Then the Drum had stopped short of twenty-six, but he had not stopped counting because of that; he had made the sounds twenty-six, when she and the woman had made them, twenty-two; now he had reckoned them twenty-six, though the Drum, as she separated the sound from other noises, still went on!
He moved on again, descending the steep side of a little ravine, and she followed. One of his snowshoes caught in a protruding root and, instead of slowing to free it with care, he pulled it violently out, and she heard the dry, seasoned wood crack. He looked down, swore; saw that the wood was not broken through and went on; but as he reached the bottom of the slope, she leaped downward from a little height behind him and crashed down upon his trailing snowshoe just behind the heel. The rending snap of the wood came beneath her feet. Had she broken through his shoe or snapped her own? She sprang back, as he cried out and swung in an attempt to grasp her; he lunged to follow her, and she ran a few steps away and stopped. At his next step, his foot entangled in the mesh of the broken snowshoe, and he stooped, cursing, to strip it off and hurl it from him; then he tore off the one from the other foot, and threw it away, and lurched after her again; but now he sank above his knees and floundered in the snow. She stood for a moment while the half-mad, half-drunken figure struggled toward her along the side of the ravine; then she ran to where the tree trunks hid her from him, but where she could look out from the shadow and see him. He gained the top of the slope and turned in the direction she had gone; assured then, apparently, that she had fled in fear of him, he started back more swiftly toward the beach. She followed, keeping out of his sight among the trees.
To twenty-six, he had counted—to twenty-six, each time! That told that he knew one was living among those who had been upon the ferry! The Drum—it was not easy to count with exactness those wild, irregularly leaping sounds; one might make of them almost what one wished—or feared! And if, in his terror here, Henry made the count twenty-six, it was because he knew—he knew that one was living! What one? It could only be one of two to dismay him so; there had been only two on the ferry whose rescue he had feared; only two who, living, he would have let lie upon this beach which he had chosen and set aside for his patrol, while he waited for him to die!
She forced herself on, unsparingly, as she saw Henry gain the shore and as, believing himself alone, he hurried northward. She went with him, paralleling his course among the trees. On the wind-swept ridges of the ice, where there was little snow, he could travel for long stretches faster than she; she struggled to keep even with him, her lungs seared by the cold air as she gasped for breath. But she could not rest; she could not let herself be exhausted. Merciless minute after minute she raced him thus— A dark shape—a figure lay stretched upon the ice ahead! Beyond and still farther out, something which seemed the fragments of a lifeboat tossed up and down where the waves thundered and gleamed at the edge of the floe.
Henry's pace quickened; hers quickened desperately too. She left the shelter of the trees and scrambled down the steep pitch of the bluff, shouting, crying aloud. Henry turned about and saw her; he halted, and she passed him with a rush and got between him and the form upon the ice, before she turned and faced him.
Defeat—defeat of whatever frightful purpose he had had—was his now that she was there to witness what he might do; and in his realization of that, he burst out in oaths against her— He advanced; she stood, confronting—he swayed slightly in his walk and swung past her and away; he went past those things on the beach and kept on along the ice hummocks toward the north.
She ran to the huddled figure of the man in mackinaw and cap; his face was hidden partly by the position in which he lay and partly by the drifting snow; but, before she swept the snow away and turned him to her, she knew that he was Alan.
She cried to him and, when he did not answer, she shook him to get him awake; but she could not rouse him. Praying in wild whispers to herself, she opened his jacket and felt within his clothes; he was warm—at least he was not frozen within! No; and there seemed some stir of his heart! She tried to lift him, to carry him; then to drag him. But she could not; he fell from her arms into the snow again, and she sat down, pulling him upon her lap and clasping him to her. She must have aid, she must get him to some house, she must take him out of the terrible cold; but dared she leave him? Might Henry return, if she went away? She arose and looked about. Far up the shore she saw his figure rising and falling with his flight over the rough ice. A sound came to her too, the low, deep reverberation of the Drum beating once more along the shore and in the woods and out upon the lake; and it seemed to her that Henry's figure, in the stumbling steps of its flight, was keeping time to the wild rhythm of that sound. And she stooped to Alan and covered him with her coat, before leaving him; for she feared no longer Henry's return.